


worship

by ssstrychnine



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Tarot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-01
Updated: 2017-07-01
Packaged: 2018-11-21 18:27:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11363127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssstrychnine/pseuds/ssstrychnine
Summary: ronan dreams stained glass





	worship

Ronan wakes up on his knees. He’s in bed and the mattress is stripped, the sheet twisted around his waist, his ankles, his calves, the sort of thing you might throw out a window to climb down, to escape from prison or a bedroom you shouldn’t be visiting. He can’t move, because he’s been dreaming, but he’s on his knees and his hands are palm up on his thighs and the window behind him is shining down colour, red and green and blue, across his skin. He’d been dreaming of St. Agnes and the splintered stairs that lead to Adam’s room. He’d been dreaming of stained glass.

When he can move again he falls, too far tangled into the sheet to keep his balance. One knee slams into the corner of his bed frame, but his hip hits the floor, taking most of the impact. He sits and kneads at the bruise until the pain spreads so thin it almost disappears. He’s glad he’s alone.

“Kerah,” says Chainsaw.

“Fuck you,” mutters Ronan.

He is not surprised to see that the window above his bed has changed. He’s never done anything like it, put something dreamt into the frame of something not-dreamt, except for Cabeswater, which makes this look like nothing. He climbs back onto his bed to get a better look.

It’s cut into pieces, like sun through water, smaller fragments of colour than the glass at St. Agnes. It takes him a whole minute of staring at it to figure out what it is and when he does it takes a lot more to keep from smashing it. Of course he would dream something so bold and young and bright. Of course he’d dream it looking down at his bed. The magician, with a wand in one hand and a snake at his wrist and a pentagram at his table. Of course he would dream Adam, when Adam isn’t there.

He stares at it until it stops looking like Adam and starts to look almost like it’s just the tarot card. He climbs off his bed and pulls on the first pair of jeans he finds and a t-shirt that isn’t aggressively dirty and he slouches down the hallway. Opal is eating cereal in the kitchen, knocking her hooves against the legs of the chair she’s perched on. She smiles at him when he enters and he scowls at her. He still isn’t used to her, the way she is a part of him and not a part of him. But he did it with Matthew, so he does it with her.

“Did you put milk in that?” he asks her, nodding at her bowl.

“Nope,” she says, impudent, grabbing a handful of dry cereal and shoving it into her mouth to prove her point. Ronan takes milk from the fridge and a spoon from a drawer and gives her both and she screws up her face but does as she’s told. Milk is good for kids, thinks Ronan, good for their bones or their teeth or some shit. H wonders if she even has the capacity to get sick. He can’t remember Matthew being sick. She can die, though. They both can.

She comes with him as he does his rounds, feeding animals, stretching out his skin. He always feels stuck when he comes out of a dream, like the real world isn’t big enough for him, but it’s better at the Barns, walking through grass that still remembers the moon. It’s better when he’s with Adam. Opal whistles a tune she knows because Ronan’s father taught him and perhaps it’s better with her too. Blue calls her his second daughter (after Chainsaw), and it makes Ronan kind of want to hit something, but there’s another part of him that wants to dance Blue around in a circle, hug her for giving him words that mean family.

(“You can come stay with me when the boys get too gross,” she tells Opal, one day, and Opal looks confused, but happy.)

Adam comes back on the weekend and Ronan hasn’t smashed the stained glass or govered it up or dreamed something else. Adam comes back and Ronan meets him on the driveway and hurries him into the house with his hands at his elbows, his waist, his wrists. He could dream forever and not come up with something half as beautiful as Adam Parrish. He has been put together, broken and unbroken, so perfectly that it makes his jaw ache.

“Chainsaw missed you,” he says.

“Did she,” murmurs Adam, and he kisses Ronan’s jaw, the corner of his mouth.

“Opal’s with Blue.”

“ _ Is _ she,” says Adam, and he kisses Ronan’s collarbone, the back of his hand.

In Ronan’s bedroom, Adam stares at the stained glass for so long Ronan thinks he’s going to break out of his skin. He stares at it and he narrows his eyes and then he smiles, this slow, sly thing that creeps across his face like an ember turning into a flame.

“You turned your bedroom into a shrine to me,” he says.

“Fuck  _ off _ ,” says Ronan. It’s hard not to bury his face in his hands, but he doesn’t. It’s hard not to blue, and he can’t be certain he doesn’t do that.

“Are you on your knees when you pray to me?” Adam asks, head cocked to one side, eyes sleepy and slow and terrible. Ronan pushes him, leaves his palms on his shoulders, lets him rock on his heels back toward him. Closer.

“What do you think, asshole,” he says, half a mumble, moving his hands from Adam’s shoulders to his collarbones to his neck to his jaw. Threading his fingers through the crooked wisps of hair at the base of his skull. He feels like he ought to say something completely awful like  _ you put a spell on me _ so he kisses Adam instead, to keep the words back, and the sun throws down red and green and blue.

**Author's Note:**

> another thing from [tumblr](http://oneangryshot.tumblr.com/post/143723068047) forever ago that i changed a little bit. i'm a little worried about tumblr as a place to keep my fic i might post it all here we'll see we'll see. thank you for reading!


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